Christmas came early this year for Dan Mann, a 46-year employee at Arms Sand & Gravel.
Mann is enjoying the fruits of the brand-new wash plant that was installed this fall at Arms in Newbury, Ohio. Maverick Environmental Equipment erected the MWS Equipment plant, which is producing two spec sands and five spec gravel products.
The wash plant consists of a SandStorm 620 and an AggStorm 15XL, and it’s knocking the socks off of the old plant that was in operation at Arms when Mann started as a young man.
“The thing is we’re running at 35 percent with the new one,” says Mann, whose plant had been operating for about two weeks when visited in November. “If you look at the hour meter, 11 hours of that plant running at 35 percent is what I can make in a week with the other one.”
That’s unreal production for Arms.
“If it keeps doing what they’re saying it’s going to do and I can bump it to 50 percent once I get bigger loaders, I don’t know how I’m going to keep up,” Mann says. “It takes a bucket and a half every minute and 50 seconds.”
Mann recognizes this is a very good problem to have, though.
Finding partners
According to Maverick’s Tim Smith, discussions about a new washing system between his company and Arms Sand & Gravel began in 2019.
Arms made the decision in 2020 to pull the trigger on the MWS Equipment plant, and the plant components were delivered and assembled this year.
“Maverick and MWS designed the plant,” says Smith, director of business development at Maverick. “Maverick worked with civil engineering, excavating concrete and electrical contractors to build this.”
MWS Equipment representatives, including senior commissioning engineer Shane Mullen, supported the startup. MWS Equipment reps arrived in the U.S. late this year after COVID travel restrictions finally softened, allowing them to visit.
“These guys came in on the red-eye and stayed a week,” Mann says. “They gave me their personal cards. Shane tweaked everything he saw that needed tweaking and said: ‘You just call me, Dan, and I’ll figure it out.’”
That reassurance, coupled with the support Maverick has shown, is comforting to Mann and the Arms team.
“The only hiccup we had with building this plant is [MWS Equipment] couldn’t come in earlier to help build it because of COVID,” Mann says. “Maverick picked up. I couldn’t believe how great they were flying blind into this.”
A big reason why Arms selected MWS Equipment in this instance is because it could source everything from one place.
“MWS has their own factory and their own representatives and engineers,” Mann says. “So it was more of a one-on-one talk. I can call them right now in [Northern] Ireland, and they talk to me. They can communicate with my plant. I can get all my answers right away.”
Product enhancements
Howard Bates, the owner of Arms Sand & Gravel, was also instrumental in bringing the wash plant to life.
According to Mann, Bates bought Arms about 10 years ago and committed to making a number of key equipment investments. Mann, however, says the wash plant is the biggest investment made in his 46 years at the operation.
“[Howard] came to me one day and said: ‘I think we should come into the future of this place, don’t you think,’” Mann says. “The thing is this place has a lot of clay. The rock is embedded in clay.”
But the new plant has answers for the rock.
“That logwasher just tears it off, and it is spotless,” Mann says.
The marketability of Arms’ products, meanwhile, has improved dramatically because of the plant.
“I just sold 300 tons of 57s that I just made that day,” Mann says. “Word got out to my septic tank people, my guys who do walls for foundations. You should see that gravel now. Now, they don’t have to go an hour down the street or two hours to get it.”
Additionally, Arms’ production is up because the plant produces little waste.
“The logwasher washes your stone for you, but instead of just wasting the sand that’s on that stone when you wash it, it sends it back to the SandStorm to pull that sand out,” says Damon Daugherty, a service technician at Maverick. “Everything that comes into this plant – every single material there – produces a product. There is no waste.”
According to Daugherty, Arms’ production has about doubled.
“We have doubled production and the product is clean,” he says. “That helps them sell it. If they make more material that looks like this, it’s easier to sell.”
Plant process
The process of producing the sand and gravel starts in one corner of the plant, where 4-in.-minus material is loaded into a hopper.
Material is then transferred to a 6-ft. x 20-ft. triple-deck wash screen that scalps 2-in. to 4-in. stone, 1.5 in. to 2 in., and 3/16 in. to 1.5 inch, with sand washing out through the bottom of the screen before it’s taken to a pair of cyclones.
The cyclones separate two spec sands. The 2- to 4-in. and 1.5 to 2 in. come off their own belts while the 3/16 in. to 1.5 in. is transported to the logwasher, producing #4 gravel, #57 gravel and #8 gravel. But that’s not all.
“You’re not just washing the sand and the dirt off and then sending that to the pond,” Daugherty says. “It runs through the SandStorm again. The sand goes through two different screen decks to pull your fines and your core sands out into two different cyclones – one for fine sand and one for coarse sand.
The future
Although freezing temperatures will likely force Arms Sand & Gravel to shut the new wash plant down this winter, Mann looks forward to starting it back up next spring and further seeing its capabilities.
“We’ll ramp it right up when I get ‘X’ amount of days warm,” Mann says.